It seems the problem of vCenter ChargeBack report not displaying certain info is becoming a popular question lately. Actually this was pointed out to me earlier today by a colleague who was reviewing my vCD design. The most common info not displayed in a vCenter ChargeBack Report are below:

vCenter ChargeBack Report Does Not Display the Network Transmitted and Network Received Information

vCenter ChargeBack Report Does Not Display the Disk Read and Disk Write Information

vCenter ChargeBack Report Does Not Display the Memory Usage Value and the Corresponding Cost

It seems many admins are getting to the point where one of the above list is not being displayed in the vCenter ChargeBack Reports although they select them while generating the report.

It turned out that the main cause of such a problem is that the statistics collection level is not properly set on the vCenter Server. This case seems to happen often as the required statistics collection level in vCenter in order for these to work is higher than the default in vCenter where statistics collection level is set to 1 by default, where in order for these to work you will need to change the vCenter Statistics collection level as shown below:

Desired Data Required Statistics Collection Level

Network Transmitted and Network Received 3 or above

Disk Read and Disk Write Information 3 or above

Memory Usage Value and the Corresponding Cost 2 or above

Please note for the Memory Usage Value and Corresponding Cost, you will have to change it to 2 or above only if using a vCenter older than vCenter 4. For vCenter 4 and above you can keep it to the default level which is 1.

For you who wonder where to change the statistics collection level to the required level in vCenter, all you need to do is:

1- Go to vCenter Server Settings ==> Statistics

2- Change the statistics level as required

3- That’s All you are done and ready to go!.

I hope this will save some one a bit of the hassle trying to figure out what he did wrong during the installation of vCenter ChargeBack and repeatingly installing and uninstalling vCenter ChargeBack without resolution as the problem or let’s say configuration he is missing is not in the vCenter ChargeBack but in vCenter. Happy Metering!

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About The Author

Eiad Al-Aqqad is a Senior Consultant within VMware Professional Services Software Defined Data Center practice. He is VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX#89). He helps VMware Enterprise customers with their Datacenter transformation efforts being Virtualization, Cloud Computing, Software Defined Datacenter, Infrastructure As A Service, or IT As a Service. I have developed strategic designs for few of the most complex environments around where I got to execute on these designs or help the customer execute upon it.